Linux – cd in bash causes cd to different directory

This type of behavior is caused by a tool frequently installed on some distributions that hook into bash. This hook makes it so that if you try to run a command, and the command doesn't exist, then bash will search the files available in the configured repositories, and tell you what package you would need to install to get that command.

If you are not on a Debian system you'll want to look at your bash startup files profiles and so on and see if anything defines the function named command_not_found_handle. If that bash function is defined, then it will be called whenever you run a command and an appropriate program cannot be found in your search path. If you run typset | less and browse through the output you will see the command_not_found_handle() function if it has been defined.

On Debian/Ubuntu the package that provides this behavior is command-not-found. If you purge that, then you will disable the lookups which does slow things down.

Here is an example

# command-not-found installed
$ time pwgen
The program 'pwgen' is currently not installed.  To run 'pwgen' please ask your administrator to install the package 'pwgen'
pwgen: command not found

real    0m0.074s
user    0m0.032s
sys     0m0.040s

# purge command-not-found and restart bash
$ time pwgen
-bash: pwgen: command not found

real    0m0.002s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s

The exact time would of course be different for you. I ran my tests on a pretty beefy server.

First of all, it might be simpler to just map your Up and Down buttons to history-search-backward and history-search-forward respectively. From man bash:

   history-search-forward
          Search  forward through the history for the string of characters
          between the start of the current line and the point.  This is  a
          non-incremental search.
   history-search-backward
          Search backward through the history for the string of characters
          between the start of the current line and the point.  This is  a
          non-incremental search.

With this enabled, if start typing the name of your command and then hit Up, only those commands from your history starting with whatever you've typed will be shown. That way, you can very quickly find the command you're interested in and don't need to fiddle around with directory-specific history files. Just type s, then Up and only commands starting with s will be found. Use fooba and only those starting with fooba will be shown.

To enable this, add the following lines to your ~/.inputrc file on the server (depending on your terminal emulator, you might need a slightly different format. Have a look at my answer here if this one doesn't work):

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward

That said, yes it is possible to set a history file per directory. Add this function to your ~/.profile (not to your ~/.bashrc since this file isn't read by default when using ssh to log into a remote machine):

 setHistFile(){
    targetDirs=("/home/terdon/foo" "/home/terdon/bar")
    for dir in "${targetDirs[@]}"; do
        if [[ "$dir" = "$PWD" ]]; then
            ## Set the history file name
            export HISTFILE="./.bash_history"
            ## clear current history
            history -c
            ## read history from the $HISTFILE
            history -r
            ## Exit the function
            return
        fi
    done
    ## This will be run if the PWD is not in
    ## the targetDirs array
    export HISTFILE="$HOME/.bash_history"
    ## Read the history (in case we are leaving
    ## one of the targetDirs)
    history -r
}

And then set your PROMPT_COMMAND variable (this is a command that is executed each time a shell prompt is shown) to it:

export PROMPT_COMMAND='setHistFile'

Change the targetDirs array to the list of the directories you want to have their own history file.